Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Is Anti-Matter a Real Thing?

Episode Date: November 6, 2018

Is anti-matter real or science fiction? Is it dangerous, or delicious? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System

On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want or gone.

Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's important that we just reassure people that they're not alone and there is help out there. The Good Stuff Podcast Season 2 takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host, Jay, Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. One Tribe, save my life twice. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff.

Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. There's a mysterious form of matter in the universe and it has really strange properties. I've heard of this kind of matter. that if it touches regular matter, it explodes. Yes, and we can only make it in super fancy particle colliders. Apparently, we don't even know why it exists. Who even asked for it? Who ordered that?

Who ordered that? I'll have what she's having, but the opposite. I don't know, some people want to explode. Hi, I'm Jorge. And I'm Daniel. And this is Daniel and Jorge explain the universe. Where we tackle the entire universe and explain it to you. Today on the program,

anti-matter. What is it? Not Antifa, not Antigua, but anti-matter. That's right. These are all good anti-jokes. I actually typed in anti into Google earlier to see what the completions were. Oh, yeah? And antimatter was like the sixth one.

Yeah. Oh, no kidding. Yeah. People are curious about it. After Antigua and Antifa and other sorts of anti stuff. Yeah. So what is it? What does it have against regular matter?

And more important, where is it? And what can it do for you? Yeah, besides blowing you up. So apparently if you touch antimatter, you're going to, explode in a ball of light. That's right. Folks out there listening to this, if you're sitting next to a blob

of antimatter, don't touch it. Run. Label it safely for other people and then run away really fast. We are very pro-safety on this podcast. We want to explain the universe, not explode the universe,

or kill everybody in the universe. All right, but before we begin talking about antimatter, we went out on the street, we asked people, what do you know about antimatter? What is antimatter? Here's what they had to say.

I guess matter is the matter, so no matter? It's like the black hole. I mean, I've heard it in relation to space, but I couldn't define it at all. It's like the opposite. It's like a proton has more mass than an electron, but it's the opposite charge. The electron has a positive charge, but it's like the lighter. All right, so most people seem to have heard of the term antimatter. That's pretty cool.

Yeah, it's really cool that people have heard of antimatter, though almost no. Nobody seems to know what it is. Yeah. Everyone seems to have the idea that it's like regular matter, but kind of like the opposite. Like it's like a weird kind of matter. Yeah. And this is one of my favorite things about antimatter is that it's a science concept that is penetrated into popular culture and mostly kept the science intact. Like the things people know about antimatter are mostly true.

Really? Which is not the case for a lot of other things in science. You know, quantum mechanics and relativity and all this stuff. of people have distorted ideas from science fiction. Well, I think one of the biggest instances of it that I've seen in movies was on that movie The Da Vinci Code or the sequel to the Da Vinci Code. Angels and Demons. Angels and Demons.

Yeah, where they were somebody trying to harness antimatter and make a bomb out of it. That's right. And you know, that movie, Angels and Demons, starts at the Atlas Detector at CERN, which is where I work, which is pretty awesome. Did you get a cameo? I didn't get to meet Tom Hanks. and I didn't get to be in the movie. But it's also always fun to see your workplace

turned into a science fiction movie because in the version of my workplace that they have in the movie, they have all these fancy displays and cool interfaces and retinal scans and all this stuff. And everyone's wearing like white lap coats, right? And safety goggles as they should.

That's right. You can't do science without a white lab coat. Yeah. You don't want to get any antimatter on your clothes. Unless they're anti-clothes and you're not that person. Science fiction is always an inspiration for real life. So there's nothing wrong there.

But there are some elements to angels and demons, which are correct. Okay. Okay, so angels and demons got correct that we do make antimatter at CERN, though not enough to make a bomb. We make antimatter at CERN. Yes, we produce it, but not enough to make a bomb. That's very important distinction. And if antimatter collides with matter,

it does annihilate and turn into energy. So you can make explosives. Yes, that is all actually. actually true. You can make a bomb, but you're not making a bomb right now. We have no plans to make bombs. Okay. But yes, technically antimatter can be used to make engines or weapons. Okay. Well, we'll get to how that all works, but let's maybe talk about what is it? The simplest way to describe antimatter is just that it's the opposite of matter, right? Every particle, most of matter is made of particles, right? Protons, neutrons, electrons, this kind of stuff. And inside the protons

and neutrons, we have corks. And the amazing thing is that each of these particles has sort of a twin, except it's the evil twin, the opposite twin. Like a mirror twin. Yes, like a mirror twin. It's not exactly the same. It's not identical twin.

It's a mirror twin because it has a lot of the properties of it are flipped. So the electron is negatively charged. The antimatter version of the electron called the positron, it has a positive charge. And so you're exactly right. The antimatter is like matter, but with the opposite charge and some other aspects of it are also flipped.

So it's not just the electrical charge that's flipped, like plus and minus, like in a battery or like an electron and a proton. It's like they have other things about them that are flipped. That's right, because the electric charge is what tells you whether something feels electromagnetism, which is one of the four forces. But there are other charges, right? There are other forces, and so other charges. Exactly. Other forces, each of which have their own charge.

So, for example, gravity has a charge, we call that mass. But you can't flip mass because you can't have negative mass. Right. Antimatter particles have positive mass. But the other forces, like the weak force, it has a charge called the hypercharge. And antiparticles can have the opposite hypercharge as well. So every particle seems to have this antiparticle, like the electron has the positron, and the quarks have the anti-quarks. And so antimatter are these particles that are exactly analogous to the particles we know and love and are made up out of, except there seem to be the opposite.

So like if a quark, regular quark, feels all of the forces, right, I think? Regular quark feels all the forces. Yeah, gravity, electromagnetism, weak force, and strong force. And there's a version of the quark that is the anti-cork that has like the opposite charge, opposite hypercharge, opposite color charge. And that's what antimatter is. It's like versions of regular matter that have everything flipped to them. Exactly. And the key thing is that we associate them together.

We say like, well, here's a particle. it the electron. Here's another particle. We call it the positron. And the connection between them is something that we've made, right? We say these two are related. They're similar in some way. They're, there's a pattern here. And we look for these patterns all the time because we're trying to like explain the larger story, right? We're trying to understand what is what we're seeing mean. And so we're always looking for patterns. So what is the thing they have in common then? Is it like the mass or, you know, just the kind of the arrangement of these charges? Why do we associate them together. Yeah, great question. They have the same mass. You're exactly right. As far as we can tell,

the electron of the positron have exactly the same mass. And they also have the same magnitude of the charge. Like the electron is charged minus one. The positron is charged plus one. The quarks have these fractional charges, two-thirds, one-third. And the anti-quarks has the opposite, you know, minus two-thirds or plus one-third. So they really do come in pairs. Oh, I see. So it's not just that they flip, it's like flipped exactly. Yeah. That's why it's so kind of special. Yeah. It's like if you discovered one day that you had a twin, right? And you didn't know about it your whole life. That would be pretty interesting. You'd wonder like, ooh, why do I have a twin? I'd be like, there can only be one. Well, you wouldn't go out necessarily and kill your twin immediately because you're worried about your inheritance. I mean, I don't know how things work in your family. Well, just convince him to try a different line of work, probably.

Please, we don't need another cartoonist. Yeah. What if you found out that everybody in town had a twin, right? Then you would conclude, oh, there's something to this. There's something 20 about my town or my country or my species, right? And that's the amazing thing about antimatter is that not just the electron has an antiparticle, but the quarks. And every particle we've discovered so far has an antiparticle.

So there's some deep symmetry of the universe. It's not just like, hey, look at this pattern we found. It's revealing of something. So everything that we know and see in touch, there can be a version of it that's like the opposite. Yeah, exactly. there's an opposite version, and not opposite in the way like, you know, oh, you had a gross breakfast this morning. There's an opposite version where you had a delicious breakfast. You know, it's opposite in the sense that it's made out of the opposite particles.

Right. First, we're talking about antiparticles. Then we can talk about antimatter, which is stuff made out of antiparticles. So that's a cool idea that you can have like an anti-electron that can form an anti-atom with an anti-proton that's made out of anti-quarks, right? Exactly. and then you can have an anti-horpe making an anti-podcast, which would collide with his podcast. Which would be anti-entertaining, unfortunately.

Oh, no. That's terrible. Anti-educational. Yeah, like you could have an atom that's made out of anti-particles, and it would sort of like look almost the same way as a regular atom, right? It would have that same kind of picture of the protons and the neutrons in the middle, anti-versions of those with anti-electrons, flying around. around it and you could have like elements right like you could have anti-oxygen and anti-carbon right is that the that's the question the question is does anti-matter mirror matter exactly

meaning does it has all the same interactions and same properties as far as we can tell it does as far as we can tell it does but that's something we're still working on because there isn't a lot of antimatter around to study so yes we've seen anti electrons we've seen anti-protons and people have done experiments where they've made anti-hydrogen and created it and studied it. And so far, it looks exactly like hydrogen except for it's made out of the antiparticles, like it has the same energy levels and the same behavior. Beyond that, it gets pretty tough because it's hard to make antimatter and it's hard to keep it around because antimatter will annihilate with normal matter. So we still have a lot of open questions, like does it really exist the same

way as matter? We know there has to be some differences because the universe is made out of matter or not antimatter, we don't know why. We haven't figured out what those differences are, but that's exactly the course of a study. And so far, it looks like it matches everything that matter can do, antimatter can also do. I have so many questions for you, but before we dive in, let's take a short break.

December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush. parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene.

In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit.

Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age.

And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

I had this, like, overwhelming sensation that I had to call her right then. And I just hit call. I said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick. I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation. And I just wanted to call on and let her know. There's a lot of people battling some of the very, same things you're battling and there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast Season 2 takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation,

a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. I was married to a combat army veteran and he actually took his own life to suicide. One Tribe saved my life twice. There's a lot of love that flows through this place and it's sincere. Now it's a personal mission. Don't have to go to any more few nights.

I got blown up on a React mission. I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and the traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. So there's a lot of questions there. So first of all, like how do you make antimatter? How do you guys make antimatter at?

CERN in Geneva. Yeah, well, we take our lamp and we rub it and the gene comes out and we just ask it nicely for antimatter. I mean, isn't it how you do science, right? That is how they do science at Disneyland, yeah. So antimatter is not that unusual. It just doesn't live very long. Like antimatter is being created all the time. Like thunderstorms create antimatter. Wait, what? What do you mean? Lightning creates antimatter. Yeah, lightning can create antimatter. Like how does it get created by lightning? Well, anytime you have a very high, energy photon, for example, a photon can turn into an electron and a positron. So it can turn into matter and antimatter. Oh, I see. So like regular matter, if it's energetic enough or

under some special condition, can suddenly like poof out of existence, antimatter. Yeah, exactly. And if you have cosmic rays, for example, cosmic rays really high energy particles hit the atmosphere. They create all these collisions and all these interactions. And some of those create high-energy particles like photons or z-es or something, which can create antimatter. And then, of course, that stuff annihilates very quickly in the atmosphere, so you don't, like, doesn't fall to the earth. You can't go and pick up a piece of antimatter, like a meteorite. So I know that I think what a lot of you see in science fiction is that antimatter, if you touch it, you're going to explode. Like if an antimatter version of me and me shake hands,

we're going to explode. Yes, not recommended. Do not shake hands with an antimatter person. How about fist bump? Fis bump? Fis bump? No. No. Put that dude in a bubble. Preferably a magnetic bubble immediately.

You know, that's an interesting question. Like, could you have antimatter life? We don't know. But your question is, does matter and antimatter annihilate when they meet? The answer is actually yes. That's one thing in science fiction that's actually true. Matter and antimatter annihilate. But it's only if the two versions of the one thing come together, like an anti-electron and an electron.

if they come together, they'll annihilate. Exactly. But not if like an anti-electron and a regular quark, they won't annihilate. That's right. So what we talked about earlier, like a photon can turn into an electron and positron. The same thing can happen in the opposite direction. An electron and a positron can annihilate into a photon or into a z boson. But you're right, not every kind of particle can annihilate with its antiparticle.

There are some rules about which particles and which antiparticles can annihilate into each other. A particle and its own antiparticle can always annihilate. And the reason is that they cancel each other out. So an electron is charged minus one. A positron is charged plus one. So they can make a photon, which is charged zero, without violating conservation of electric charge. But an electron can't annihilate with another electron because that would be charged minus two. And the photon can't have charge minus two.

So there has to be kind of like the mirror perfection in order for them to annihilate. Like you can't take an electron, smash it. with a proton, which has the opposite charge, but there's sort of like different things. They're not anti-versions of each other. And those, like a proton and an electron, won't annihilate. That's right.

A proton will not annihilate with an electron. They'll interact and they'll bang off each other, but they will not annihilate into like a neutral particle, like a photon. So what's the difference between a positron and a proton? What's the difference between a positron and a proton? Yeah. That makes it annihilate with the electron? We don't know.

It's something we do in physics where we say, well, we see this pattern. We don't understand why one thing happens and something else happens. So we'll just invent a rule. We'll say, well, let's create a number called electronness. And we say the electron carries electronness. The anti-electron carries negative electronness. And we'll just say, let's theorize that there's a rule that electronness has to be conserved. And so that's why, for example, a negative electron can't announce.

with a positive muon, because a positive muon doesn't carry the right amount of electron-ness. And you might think, this sounds totally made up. It's totally made up. And like a muon is heavier than an electron, therefore, it must have something different. Yeah, even though therefore there is a bit tenuous, because this is like a description of what we've seen. We've never seen an electron and anti-muon annihilate together into a photon. Why not? We don't have a good reason why not. We just invent a rule. But the rule is really just a description of what we have seen so far. We say, well, there must be this rule.

We don't know why there's this rule, but it describes what we've seen so far. People are looking for that. Right. So we don't know why matter annihilates with antimatter. We just know that it does. We understand how matter can annihilate with antimatter, how the electron can annihilate with the positron. We don't know why the electron is picky. Like, why doesn't it also annihilate with the muon or with the tau or other stuff?

There seem to be these rules, but there's plenty of these particles around. So if Jorge meets anti-Horhe, your electrons will annihilate with his positrons, or I guess her, I don't know, what anti-horpe would look like, right? And your protons would annihilate with his anti-protons. So that wouldn't be a problem. So what happens when we annihilate? Like, what creates the explosion? Yeah, it's an enormous amount of energy. Everybody's heard the equation E equals MC squared.

From Einstein, yeah? Yeah, Einstein's equation, energy, E, is equal to mass times the speed of light squared. Okay, so that tells you how much energy is stored inside mass. What happens when a particle and antiparticle meet is they turn into photons or energy, right? And that's a huge amount of energy because mass has an enormous amount of energy in it, because the speed of light, a C squared, is a big number. So, for example, let's give some people a scale, if you took a raisin, which is like one gram of matter, and push it up against an anti-raison, right?

That two grams of matter has enough energy to create an explosion the size of a nuclear weapon. Wow. Yes. So to make a nuclear weapon, you just need a raisin and an anti-raison and put them together. And all of the electrons and protons and antiversions

would like convert into energy. To make a nuclear weapon-sized bomb out of matter and antimatter. How do we get here? We're like giving people prescriptions for how to build weapons. all of a sudden on this show. I think this is going to get flagged by the Department of Homeland Security. I think there's somebody knocking on my door.

Fortunately, there's not enough antimatter on Earth to make that kind of device. I mean, I said at CERN, we manufacture antimatter. But we manufacture picograms of antimatter a year for use in science experiments. So not nearly enough to make anything practical. Well, that's the big mystery about antimatter, right? Like, it's, we know it's a mirror version of everything around us, a regular matter like us. And so it's possible, like, it's equally likely to exist as us, but there's none of it, there's not much of it in the universe. Like, we don't see it around.

Yeah, there seems to be nothing preventing it from being created, but as far as we can tell, most of the universe is made out of matter and not antimatter. And we wonder, when we see these symmetries, we're like, well, this seems like everything is the same between matter and antimatter. Why does the universe then prefer matter and not antimatter? Why are we not made out of antimatter? Now, of course, there's just a word game there. If we were made out of antimatter, we would probably call that matter. The question is really, why are we made out of this kind and not the other kind? Like, why are we made of the kind of matter where the electron has a negative charge as opposed to all of us being made out of electrons with a positive charge? Yeah, that's a great question because as far as we can tell, there are very small differences between the way matter and antimatter work. So you can make atoms out of matter or atoms that of antimatter.

Yeah. And so we don't have an explanation for that. People think that in the beginning of the universe, there was the same amount. That's one possibility, right? Like we started the universe with equal amounts of both, matter and antimatter. Yeah, and that's the simplest explanation because we think that the universe started in sort of a symmetric state. I mean, either the universe started in an asymmetric state like with more matter than antimatter. And then you have to ask, well, why?

That doesn't answer the question of why is there more matter than antimatter now. Either it started with an asymmetry. Because mathematically, according to the equations, they're like the same. There's no reason why you would prefer the plus the negative electron as opposed to the positive electron. That's right. We found a few ways that the universe prefers matter to antimatter, but they're really small. So if you start off saying the universe begins with the same amount of matter and antimatter, then you have to explain where did all the antimatter go, right?

Because if there was the same amount, you imagine eventually they would annihilate and the whole universe would just be photons, right? But there must have been more matter than antimatter or something that prefers matter to antimatter, like turns antimatter into matter somehow to explain why we have matter left over but no antimatter. So that's one possibility. We started out with the same amount, and somehow we are only left with one kind of matter. That's right.

And we have found a few ways for that to happen. It's called CP violation for those who are interested. There are a few processes we've discovered that prefer making matter over antimatter, but they're too small. They don't explain the huge asymmetry that we've seen. You know, explain like 1% of it. But there is a preference in the universe. You're saying in the laws of physics, there is a slight preference for matter. anti-matter. That's right, yeah. It connects to this question of charge conservation and

parity and charge parity conservation, and we should do a whole other podcast on that and whether particles prefer moving forward or backward in time and whether they prefer being matter or antimatter. But those are very, very small differences. So we're looking for larger asymmetions. We haven't found any. People are hunting. Is there a process which can turn antimatter into matter or prefers matter? Nobody's found it so far. We're still looking. It's a big mystery. It's a big mystery, yeah. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport.

The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually... The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back.

In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice. Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot.

He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now hold up, isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him?

Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Yes. Hey, sis, what if I could promise you you never had to listen to a condescending finance bro? Tell you how to manage your money again. Welcome to Brown Ambition. This is the hard part when you pay down those credit cards. If you haven't gotten to the bottom of why you were racking up credit or turning to credit cards, you may just recreate the same problem a year from now. When you do feel like you are bleeding from these high interest rates, I would start shopping for a debt consolidation loan, starting with your local credit union, shopping around online, looking for some online, online lenders because they tend to have fewer fees and be more affordable. Listen, I am not here to judge. It is so expensive in these streets. I 100% can see how in just a few months you can have this much credit card debt and it weighs on you.

It's really easy to just like stick your head in the sand. It's nice and dark in the sand. Even if it's scary, it's not going to go away just because you're avoiding it. And in fact, it may get even worse. For more judgment-free money advice, listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Is it possible that the next galaxy over is maybe made out of antimatter? It's a possibility that there is antimatter hiding out there in the universe.

So let's think for a moment, how would you find antimatter, right? Well, I mean, if there's any antimatter on Earth, they would very quickly annihilate with normal matter. And the thing you would see is photons being created. Those photons, for example, would have the same energy of the mass of the electron. So what happens when an electron, a positron annihilate is you get two photons, actually, one that has the mass of the electron, the other has the mass of the positron, which is the same. And we know that number, so we can look for that. So we can see matter-antamatter annihilation because we look for these photons of a specific energy.

And we don't see any on Earth, and we look around in our solar system, we don't see any here, and we look further and we look further. Any kind of pockets of antimatter or even a small amount of it that's hanging out near regular matter, it would just like annihilate and we would see the explosion, right? Yeah. And so imagine you have like a galaxy that's of antimatter that's next to a galaxy of matter. Maybe they're far enough away that they're not going to collide and annihilate in some super cataclysm, right? But they're going to be shooting particles out. This is going to be a boundary.

At the boundary between them, you would expect to see a lot of matter, antimatter collision. and you would see these photons of a special energy being created. And so that's what people look for to see, is there like a boundary to the edge of our matter bubble? Maybe the rest of the universe is made out of antimatter, and we're just made out of matter. So they look for the edge of this bubble to see how far they can push the proof of matter. Oh, I see.

And they look beyond the solar system, and the whole galaxy, we're pretty sure, is made out of matter. And also our cluster of galaxies is made out of matter. but beyond that we're not sure because it's really hard to see that far and to see these little blips of electron-positron annihilation of matter anti-matter interaction. You can't just tell the difference

by looking at it. Like a star you're seeing in the night sky today or a galaxy you see out in the night sky it could be an antimatter galaxy or an antimatter star. You wouldn't be able to tell just by looking at it. That's right. If matter and antimatter work the same way, then an antimatter star

would look just like a normal star. It would have the same fusion process and send up the same kinds of photons and look exactly the same. Wow. But at the core of it, it would be like anti-stuff, burning inside of it. Yeah, anti-fusion. But the interesting thing is maybe your listeners are thinking, well, what about the photon, right? People might be wondering, wouldn't anti-sons? Wouldn't the crazy thing about the photon is it has no electric charge, it has no weak charge. So it is its own antiparticle. Oh, because it doesn't have these charge. that the other particles have.

It doesn't have anything to flip. That's right. There's nothing to flip. It's like a perfect ball looks the same in the mirror. Exactly. It's like the connection between matter and antimatter. It's the bridge, right? And so antimatter stars make photons just the same way matter stars make photons.

Wow. And so you can't tell the difference. You're exactly right. So we think the universe is probably made out of matter rather than antimatter. It's just simpler because everything around us and in our galaxy and in our galaxy cluster is made out of matter, but we don't actually

know it could be the deep out there there's huge blobs of antimatter. But even still, say that's the case. Say the universe is like pockets of matter and pockets of antimatter. Then you have to ask, well, why? Why do we prefer matter here and antimatter there? There has to be some difference to explain the fact that

we are matter and not antimatter. And that's a fascinating question. It's like a huge symmetry in the universe that we've discovered, except there's this asymmetry to it, right? It's like an almost symmetry. It's a broken symmetry. And those are really interesting clues if you want to understand something deep about the universe, about it.

It's very organization. It's like, why are most people right-handed? You could, like, why isn't half the population right-handed and the other half left-handed? You're right. It's a good analogy because you could be right or left-handed, right? There's no reason to prefer one or the other sort of anatomically. So why are most people right-handed? Yeah.

It could have been some arbitrary moment in the history, in the prehistory of humanity where, you know, some gene preferred this. or the other, and now we're all living that way. And it could be the same with matter and antimatter. That's some moment in the early universe. It could have gone one way or the other, and now we're living in a matter universe. A lot of big events in the universe could come from random quantum fluctuations in the early

moments, yeah. That just kind of flipped it for everybody else. And we're all living with that decision. So we talked a little bit about how we study it. So at Stern, you take, you collide particles, and hopefully sometimes out that ball of energy out comes out some antimatter and then what do you do with it? You can't

hold it, right? Or how do you store it and how do you like do things with it if it explodes if it touches regular matter? Yeah. So it's starting to do two kinds of studies with antimatter. One is we just smash protons together to create exotic new particles and a lot of times those will turn into matter and antimatter pairs and then we just we see those like you create a z boson and it turns into a muon and an anti-mune, totally normal. everyday kind of thing. But there are people at CERN who are also dedicated to studying

this question of antiparticles and they make antimatter and then they form it into atoms and then they do trap it. The only way to trap antimatter is to build a bottle that holds it without touching it. And so you can do that with magnets.

Oh. Like you create a magnetic field that traps all of these antiparticles inside of the magnetic fields. That's right. And they can like swoosh around in a circle and so yeah you can control it without touching it because antimatter also feels magnetism

and so they've done experiments where they've created like anti-hydrogen yeah anti-hydrogen and they've poked it and interacted with it and they've you know they've seen does it interact the same way we we do and so far it looks pretty normal but you know there's still some really deep questions about antimatter like does it feel gravity the same way that we do or the opposite to study that you need a lot of antimatter we can only make tiny tiny amounts Well, I think this sort of relates to these deeper questions about the mathematics of the universe. You know, we have these equations that say, oh, you should see antimatter versions of everything. But then how those equations relate to what we actually see, like the real world, though that's another, that's a bigger question, right?

Yeah, it comes out of these mathematical models. You're right. It's like in the 20s, people are trying to build up math that described what we saw. on quantum mechanics and all that stuff was pretty new. And a guy named Paul Dirac was putting together a description of really fast-moving electrons. And he noticed that his equation worked for fast-moving negatively charged electrons, the kind we saw. But it also worked for positively charged electrons. He thought, hmm, that's interesting. Do those exist?

And for a while, he thought maybe the proton was the anti-electron. But then people showed that that couldn't be. So he said, well, then I'm going to postulate the existence of a new particle, the anti-electron. And just a few years later, a guy at Caltech found it. And then actually at Dirac won the Nobel Prize. And at his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he predicted the anti-proton, which was then later found.

So he like doubled down at his Nobel Prize speech and went for a second one. Wow. Well, so what do you think is the larger lesson here about antimatter? I think that the larger lesson is that there are patterns in what's going on in the universe. And those patterns are clues. They're clues that are going to tell us how things work.

Oh. You know, we don't know what the whole clue, though. Like, we've discovered that particles have this weird mirror twin. Are there other ways that particles are mirrored? Are there other kinds of matter? Like, maybe there's a particle and an antiparticle and a third kind we haven't even imagined. Wow, a secret triplet. Yeah, or like a neutral version of every particle or something.

Man, and then you would hear the soap opera music. Dun-dum-dum! That's right. I think the lesson is that we need to look for these patterns, and these patterns tell us something about the organization of the universe. I mean, my personal scientific fantasy is to figure out, like, what is the deepest layer of matter? How is everything put

together? Because I feel like if we found out that the universe was made out of strings or little beach balls or tiny hamsters or something, it would tell us something deep about the universe itself, right? And so, accumulating these patterns and noticing these symmetries, these things are clues that are going to help us figure out

how things are arranged. Like maybe electrons and positrons are made out of the same little sub pieces just arranged differently, right? And so then it makes perfect sense for you to have two kinds. Maybe they're not mirror images of each other. They're just like different ways that the Lego pieces inside are put together.

Yeah, they're inside out or some other analogy. We don't know. And the fact that every particle seems to have an antiparticle as far as we can tell seems like a big clue that it's something basic about matter itself. Well, in the meantime, the lesson seems to be if you see an antimatter version of yourself, run.

Not shake hands That's right Also, most of the stuff you read about antimatter in science fiction is real So anti-matter universes could exist out there There could be anti-people

and anti-podcasts and anti-jokes and all that stuff It could be out there And maybe one day we'll meet aliens But we won't be able to touch them Because they'll be anti-matter

Oh man, that would be very anti-climatic Oh no, I totally walked into that And with that Thank you so much you guys for listening So antimatter is a deep mystery. We don't know why it's there. We don't know what it means. We don't know, does it feel gravity the same way we do?

Does it feel anti-gravity? We know that there are some clues about the way the universe works and the reason it prefers matter that are hidden in these mysteries of antimatter. And we have to just keep making it and studying it before we can figure this stuff out. Cool. Thank you for listening. We hope you guys enjoyed that. Yeah. Thanks very much.

If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line we'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge, that's one word, or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorpe.com. So long. This thing is ancient. Still using yesterday's tech, upgrade to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, ultra-light, ultra-powerful, and built for serious productivity with Intel Core Ultra processors,

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